A Recovering Algorithm for Disconnected Virtual Backbone Nodes in Hierarchical Wireless Networks

Abstract

Since there are no fixed infrastructures in some wireless scenarios, constructing a connected dominating set (CDS) of virtual backbone nodes to reduce communicating overhead and enhance scalability of the network is an effective strategy. However, some virtual backbone nodes may disconnect with each other occasionally, especially in highly mobile scenarios. In the past few years, many CDS construction algorithms try to achieve a minimum CDS (MCDS), and some algorithms are proposed to tackle with the recovery of CDS. Most works assume that each node could easily discover the whole outgoing and incoming neighbors, whether in unit disk graph (UDG) or disk graph (DG). However, it is hard to obtain the global topology information in mobile networks. It is even more challenging in hierarchical wireless networks considering the diverse capabilities of nodes, where some high-level nodes with larger coverages are more prone to be appointed as backbone nodes. In this paper, we propose a CDS-based recovering algorithm for disconnected virtual backbone nodes in mobile hierarchical wireless networks. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve a smaller set of nodes to recover the connection of virtual backbone nodes compared with the existing works without increasing communicating overhead.